Hourglass: A library for incremental processing on Hadoop

Hadoop enables processing of large data sets through its relatively easy-to-use semantics. However, jobs are often written inefficiently for tasks that could be computed incrementally due to the burdensome incremental state management for the programmer. This paper introduces Hourglass, a library for developing incremental monoid computations on Hadoop. It runs on unmodified Hadoop and provides an accumulator-based interface for programmers to store and use state across successive runs; the framework ensures that only the necessary subcomputations are performed. It is successfully used at LinkedIn, one of the largest online social networks, for many use cases in dashboarding and machine learning. Hourglass is open source and freely available.